Monday, April 18, 2011

Paul Allen owns a megayacht named Octoups, seen above (please, no 007 jokes).

Paul Allen, the 58-year-old co-founding Microsoft billionaire, is on a roll again. He’s giving eyebrow-raising interviews left and right clearly meant to impress and inspire Apple fans and Microsoft haters. It’s a calculated move for a very prosaic reason – tomorrow sees the launch of The Idea Man, a memoir supposedly filled with dirty secrets about his complex business dealings with Bill Gates and Microsoft.

He first sat down with 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl and then did an interview with Wired’s Sam Gustin and other media outlets. Working with Bill Gates was like “being in hell,” he quipped. Microsoft “needs to accelerate the pace of product development” to better compete with Apple and Google, he said, the two firms with which he’s locked in an intellectual property dispute. “Unbelievable” is how he described Apple’s turnaround before launching into this Steve Jobs appraisal:

What he’s done with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad – what a triple play there.For more, watch a clip from the CBS interview right below the fold.

Gates and Allen used to engage in heated discussions that took a turn for the worse. Gates would call him names in front of other employees, Allen revealed in his book. The growing anxiety and anger and Stage 4 lymphoma he had been diagnosed with had ultimately led to his exit from the company in 1983 and resignation from the board in 2000. Allen owns the Octopus megayacht (pictured above), two professional sports teams, the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League and the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association, plus a whole bunch of expensive high-tech toys. Forbes says he’s seventeenth wealthiest American with an estimated net worth of $13 billion.

Wall Street analysts as well as their unaffiliated colleagues polled by Fortune’s spreadsheet wizard Philip Elmer-DeWitt are modelling up to 19 million iPhones in the first calendar quarter, Apple’s second fiscal quarter. The estimates range from as low as 13.24 million units (Goldman Sachs’ Bill Schope) to an astounding 19.80 million iPhones (Jeff Fidacaro of Susquehanna). Apple sold 16.24 million iPhones in the lucrative holiday quarter and 8.75 million units in the year-ago quarter. A few other tidbits caught our attention as well…

Quarterly revenues could match the $26.74 billion filed in the holiday quarter ($13.5 billion in the year-ago quarter). iPods are expected to top out at 10 million units versus twice as much shipped in the Christmas quarter. iPad sales should be on par with the 7.33 million units shipped in the previous quarter and Macs are seen closing in on four million units. These are, of course, analysts’ estimates and we all know that Apple consistently blows them out of the water quarter after quarter. Head over at Fortune to catch the rest. Apple, which trades on Nasdaq under the AAPL ticker, will see on May 2 its weighting cut by one fifth on the Nasdaq-100 index that tracks the hundred largest nonfinancial Nasdaq stocks.

The consumer electronics powerhouse is scheduled to release fiscal 2011 second quarter earnings this coming Wednesday right after the markets close. A live webcast of a conference call with analyst, which is due at 5 pm Eastern (2 pm Pacific) will be available here.*thanks 9to5Mac*

Besides Apple now allowing users to view the top 300 iOS apps, Apple has reportedly changed up their App Store ranking algorithm. Inside Mobile Apps reports that Apple’s ranking system may not completely rely on the amount of downloads per day anymore. It’s definitely too early to be certain, but it looks like App Store rankings may now also adjust based on application usage and ranking. Perhaps Apple also wanted to move the 10 bird apps out of the top 10 rankings.

The possible algorithm change was first noticed when Facebook suddenly jumped to number 1 – after an App Store refresh last week- after sitting in the 10-20 range for the past year and a half. We have a feeling this may also have to do with usage, as Facebook is possibly the app that most users come back to throughout the day. Number 2 and 3, respectively, are the highly addicting Impossible Test and Angry Birds.

Flurry’s vice president also believes that there was an algorithm change:

“We’ve been noticing changes in the Top Free rankings for at least three days now,” said Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry, which serves 80,000 applications with its analytics product. “From our point of view, Apple is absolutely considering more than just downloads, which we believe is the right direction go to measure true popularity of an app.” Other pay-per-install networks tell us they’ve been detecting these changes too.We think this is a good decision by Apple; perhaps to keep the spammy titles out of the top rankings. Apple might even use data covering how many users deleted a respective application. If the app gets one million downloads but gets deleted 500,000 times, the description/title of the app is surely lying somehow, and now it can be kept out of the top rankings.

Don’t hold you breath for a glasses-free 3D screen on the next iPhone, it would be very unlike-Apple to go with the tech many folks suspect is just a fad. If you’re a fan of 3D imagery, this nifty app will have you covered.

Panorama4D by OWLAB is a photography app that lets you take stereoscopic 3D images with your phone even though your device has a “dumb” 2D camera. Plus, you can slightly rotate around your subject on images bullet-time style by tilting your device. How does it work?

Simple, really. You just extend your arms and rotate to the left side until you hit the marker. The app will begin recording the video as you rotate to the opposite direction and stop when another marker is hit.

It will then analyze and align the individual frames to generate ten stereoscopic images of the subject at different angles.

There’s lot of number crunching involved in this step and if the app crashes due to fragmented memory, closing the running tasks and restarting the device will help.

When you’re ready to marvel your work in three dimensions, put on your anaglyphs glasses, choose 3D mode and enjoy. You can even chose the type of stereoscopic glasses in the app’s settings, go for a grayscale mode or enjoy your images in old school 2D. What sold me was the gyroscope 4D mode that rotates the view around your subject depending on how you tilt your device. This bullet-time-like effect is cool and provides a believable illusion of depth, but it takes a lot of practice to capture nice 4D shots and you may not be entirely satisfied with the results. Stereoscopic images look much better, but also require perfectly aligned shots.

Other features include Facebook, Twitter and email sharing, face detection that helps keep people in frame, auto flash, resolution presets (480-by-320 and 960-by-640) and cool CoverFlow-like image gallery. Available for two bucks in the App Store, Panorama 4D works on iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, fourth-generation iPod Touch and iPad 2.